Why don’t you ask this lady what she thinks of another country having access to her private data?
Strange things can happen when you call tech support.
But perhaps not quite as strange as what allegedly happened to Tara Fitzgerald. According to News10 in Sacramento, Calif., Fitzgerald wanted to send some pictures of herself to her boyfriend, but she couldn’t find them on her Dell computer.
Her urgent need to find these pictures drove her, quite naturally, to call Dell tech support. Her call was answered, she said, by a gentleman in Mumbai, India, named Riyaz Shaikh.
Shaikh, who, by the time you finish this tale, might not turn out to be a gentleman, after all, offered to remotely access her computer so that he could find the pictures for her. Fitzgerald said she watched him as he located her snapshots.
It was another fine day in the helpful history of tech support. However, this success was ruined somewhat, when Fitzgerald allegedly received an e-mail from an unidentified source telling her that her pictures were now freely available for anyone to see on the Web. They were on a site called “bitchtara.”
Perhaps I omitted to mention that many of these pictures depicted Fitzgerald in the nude. And the Web site, as well as clearly violating her privacy, unfortunately offered lewd descriptions of her proclivities that were not in line with reality.
Keep that in your mind when you’re voting in California, or any other state.
By the way, when you’re reading this article, I want you to pay attention to the comments about 30 years, because I distinctly remember when I was in the Navy between 76 to 82 and reading on the teletypes on the mid watch about the steel mills jobs going over seas.
I don’t know who specifically made that happen, but I can guarantee you that they were part of Wall Street somehow and that they told two lies.
Lie 1 being they will find similar or better paying jobs
Lie 2 being we can make more money and we don’t need anything having anything to do with manufacturing, farming or ranching, so lets let the cheap labor in other countries do our manual labor.
I’m not that old at 52, but I still remember when the mom and pop type stores that knew you by name were all over the country and we never saw a big superstore anywhere.
Back then our kids knew that our food came from farming and ranching and our options if we weren’t rich enough to go to college were the oil field, manufacturing or the military.
I tried all 3 of them and they are all great and necessary industries.
Yet our leaders for the last 30 years or so have been sending all of these type of jobs offshore and putting our people out of work.
I was drinking a beer last night with one of my high school buddies and he told about one of our class mates that had worked for Muzak almost all of his life that has now been laid off and is unable to find work except as an electricians helper for 8 bucks or so an hour.
I’ve lost touch with this guy so I don’t know his situation, but at 55 I bet he has children, a house, mortgage, etc. and everybody depending on him and what does he get from our corporations?
Somewhere somehow the bean counters have taken over the corporations and they’ve isolated themselves behind their ivory tower walls so that they no longer have to put a face to a name.
And I’m here to tell you that I believe this 10 year period from 2003 to 2013 is going to be the period that all of this destruction our very large corporations are responsible for is going to come to an end.
As a matter of fact, for my own personal thoughts on the situation, I believe it is time that we broke any company that had more then 1,000 employees into separate companies by selling them off and enforcing our monopoly laws.
Yep, I’m well aware that those working for the very large corporations will disagree with me, but ask yourself this question.
Is there a connection between China becoming the Second Largest Economy over the past 30 years and America going through what all of our fellow citizens are experiencing here in our great country right now?
I for one think there is.
It really is that simple!
China has overtaken Japan to become the world’s second-largest economy, the fruit of three decades of rapid growth that has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.
As anyone who has read my articles posted here knows I’m not a big fan of either party.
Here in California we have two heavy weights running for election. One is the former CEO of eBay from 1998 – 2008, Meg Whitman, a Republican running for Governor with plenty of personal wealth and powerful interest that could help her win. The other is the former CEO of HP from 1999 – 2005 Carly Fiorina a Republican running for State Senator in a bid to unseat Democrat Barbara Boxer. She, like Whitman has plenty of personal wealth and powerful interest too. But the Senate race appears to be tight. Senator Boxer appears to be more popular with the general public then does the Democrat opposing Whitman for Governor, former Governor Jerry Brown. Regardless, all of these principle players have big money and powerful interest behind them. But quite frankly big interest is the last thing we need more of running the show whether here in California or in Washington.
I’m not picking on Ms Whitman or Ms Fiorina, I’m sure both ladies are nice people. Both talk tough about creating jobs and both talk tough about making California competitive – again. But folks it’s not about making California or the U.S. or even U.S. companies competitive, that’s not our real challenge. When it comes to jobs the real issue here should be about how American wages are to compete with the cheap wages abroad. Own any HP products? Ever notice where they’re manufactured? HP products contribute to our trade imbalance. I am sure both these ladies truly relate to the unemployed American programmer who can’t find meaningful work because his job was outsourced.
Take my word for it, our elected officials know the real deal but there are no simply solutions and they mustn’t let the secret out. If you really believe your candidate and party of choice has your back you may want to reconsider, especially if you are unemployed. The following story illustrates my point and some readers may recall this event, frankly I had forgotten about it.
Back in July 2004 Congress was expecting a report it had requested via an Act of Congress but the Bush Administration blocked them from receiving. With the elections on the horizon Bush handlers feared the findings of the report would be damaging to his reelection. That report, a 364 page document prepared by the Commerce Department – Office of Technology Policy entitled “An Overview of Workforce Globalization in the U.S. IT Services and Software, U.S. Semiconductor, and U.S. Pharmaceutical Industries,” provided an in-depth analysis of the ongoing loss of U.S. high tech jobs (semiconductors, information technology and software, and pharmaceuticals) and represented the most complete analysis to date on offshoring of U.S. jobs. The report’s findings were not favorable thus a 2 year battle ensued with the White House and Congressional Republicans blocking Democrats demands for them to release the report.
In September 2005 the Commerce Department released to Congress a 12-page summary of the report which concealed most of the harmful findings plus put a positive spin on outsourcing. While Congress did eventually receive the actual Commerce report in 2006 making 46 pages of it available here, the full electronic copies of both it and the 12 page summary report have never been made available to the public on the Commerce site.
What was released to the public was a 70 page report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) entitled OFFSHORING: U.S. Semiconductor and Software Industries Increasingly Produce in China and India but its analysis focused on only two sectors, the semiconductor and software industries were the Commerce report focused on four industries. While its findings confirmed some of those of the suppressed Commerce report, it too like the 12 page summary painted a rosier picture of the consequences of outsourcing. Unlike the Commerce report the GAO report made no recommendations.
The offshore outsourcing of American jobs under the pretext of “free trade” and “globalization” is an agenda of U.S multinational corporations and therefore the agenda of both parties. I can’t help but wonder how much of the battle over this Commerce Report was political grandstanding with a bunch of smoke and mirrors. Yes its findings, if made public, might have been damaging to Bush but from a historical vantage point for anyone with their head not stuck up some deep dark cavernous hole it should have been equally damaging for both parties. I suspect far more powerful influences were at play in suppressing this report and our political friends dutifully played the good cop versus bad cop game they know so well. This fiasco reminds me of playing hide and seek where you twirl the blindfolded guy (that’s you and me) all around before setting him loose to go seek the hiders. It turns out that while this conflict was hotly reported and debated in the press not much was made of it during or after the elections.
Details of this sordid affair may be reviewed with these articles:
The GOA report charts the trend in outsourcing that began in the 1960’s and reveals the long term evolution of the outsourcing strategy. This process evolved slowly expanding over time as corporations realized the financial benefits to their bottoms lines with the report pointing out on page 7:
As firms experienced cost savings and observed high-quality work in these offshore locations, they expanded offshore operations to include more advanced operations, such as software design and systems integration.
And on page 13 notes:
Offshoring in semiconductor manufacturing began in the 1960s with labor intensive manufacturing activities, such as assembly. U.S. firms invested in overseas manufacturing facilities to perform the labor-intensive assembly of semiconductors for export to the United States.
On page 15, Fig 2 the GOA report charts:
U.S. Semiconductor Manufacturing Trends, 1960–2005
1960s to 1980s
Assembly abroad
Companies initially moved assembly, testing, and packaging offshore.
1980s to 2000s
Foundries abroad
Companies began contracting with offshore fabrication plants to produce wafers from designs.
2000s to 2005
Design abroad
Some design services were offshored, or a part of global teams operating in many countries.
Complex global production chains developed as designs may be fabricated in different locations, and wafers then sent to still other locations for assembly, testing, and packaging.
During all this time where have our elected officials been? It goes without saying but during this enter time only Corporate America, Republicans, and the Democrats have been running the show in Washington. Corporate America rolled their big money machines into town many years ago and it’s been a plutocracy party feast ever since.
The Democrats fighting to get that Commerce report chaired the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science and Technology and once receiving it provided a 46 page Overview summary and reported some of its findings:
The U.S. semiconductor industry has an established history of outsourcing and off-shoring. Fifty percent of the industry’s employees and thirty percent of its engineers were in offshore locations in 2003
Venture capitalists are now encouraging U.S. IT start-ups to use lower cost offshore destinations for software development to reduce the “cash-burn rate
The present driver of off-shoring in semiconductor design is to reduce labor costs and shorten the time to market
Present outsourcing and off-shoring trends have the potential to affect the U.S. semiconductor manufacturing workforce” putting downward pressure on U.S. wages…
The overview verifies what the article noted above, “Commerce Reports finally sees light of day” posted at the Manufacturing and Technology News website when they reported receiving a full copy of the report giving the following accounting of some of its findings:
it…contains a long (and sobering) section on the shift of the U.S. semiconductor industry to offshore locations …”As leading companies locate in or contract with labor in other countries, concerns about the shift of work include fears that higher value work may shift from the United States to other locations, impacting U.S. industrial strength and high-salary employment… Layoffs in the United States, especially in the IT sector, have only exacerbated this concern
…there is “growing pressure in corporate America — from customers, consultants, and financial markets — to offshore IT work, as well as growing external and political pressure to stem the flow of American jobs going overseas
The report …highlights the fact that the impact on U.S. competitiveness “appears to be negligible”
In the long term, the U.S. risks losing high-end R&D and design jobs because, as semiconductor fabs move to Asia, high-skilled jobs move with them
The design centers that U.S. companies are “rapidly” creating in Asia “do not support local customers but support the home office with lower-cost designers
The cost of employing a design engineer in Ireland, Taiwan, China or India has been estimated to be 50 to 90 percent lower than in the United States
It further states that, “the number of engineers employed offshore by U.S. semiconductor companies rose by more than 10,000 between 2000 and 2003, while engineers employed in the United States dropped by 4,000 during the same period, according to estimates by the Semiconductor Industry Association
The report …describes the types of IT services and software jobs …being outsourced…stating the obvious: that Indian outsourcing companies “are expanding staff annually by the thousands.” The report describes the reasons for the trend including the fact that “venture capitalists are now encouraging U.S. IT start-ups to use lower-cost offshore destinations for software development to reduce the ‘cash burn rate
…the report ventured into issues impacting the continued loss of semiconductor industry jobs. “With fewer companies investing in new wafer manufacturing in the United States, process R&D co-located with leading edge facilities may also decline, resulting in fewer high-skill jobs for U.S. graduates. Offshoring of design work can also impose downward pressure on U.S. wages and reduce the demand for U.S. design engineers. As the number of overseas design centers increases, it may draw foreign talent from the United States
It…also addressed the potential of offshore outsourcing in the pharmaceutical industry…[the report in observed that] skyrocketing health care costs could lead to pharmaceutical companies deciding not to make future investments in the United States. “It may be…that investment incentives and the global geography of capabilities and infrastructure will shift in the years ahead in ways that will help other countries’ pharmaceutical industries take on a larger role than at present in the global pharmaceutical innovation engine…
With most chip manufacturing moving offshore and the number of new U.S. design centers in India growing every month, some observers also worry that U.S. companies will eventually shift research and development overseas. The Commerce report quoted one semiconductor executive as concluding: “Industry is pretty well agreed that it will”
Reducing labor costs is the key driver, the report added, noting that design engineers in China or India, among other locales, are paid as much as 80 percent less than U.S. engineers.
Interestingly in 2003 economist apparently were referring to the recovery at the time as a “jobless recovery.” In an article by The Registry noted Intel CEO Craig Barrett: Admits jobs aren’t coming back to US:
They’re calling it the ‘jobless recovery’ – but it’s a misleading phrase. New jobs are being created in the tech sector, only CEOs are making sure they’re in China and India, not at home in the United States.
Craig Barrett admits to the New York Times today that while Intel has maintained a steady head count in the US, it has hired a thousand new software engineers in India and China.
The Times cites an estimate that a million jobs have been moved offshore since March 2001.
Barrett has a curious phrase to justify this new trend. “To be competitive, we have to move up the skill chain overseas,” he said.
Reiterated throughout both the Commerce Overview report and the GAO report is the primary reason for outsourcing is to reduce labor cost with the Commerce Overview noting:
In India…salaries are about a fifth of U.S. salaries… resulting in savings for U.S. companies of about 40 percent once factoring in additional cost for travel, management, and infrastructure.
The main driver for IT services and software offshoring is cost reductions in labor cost resulting in savings of up to 70 to 90 percent, with total net savings reaching 35 to 60 percent compared to performing that work in the U.S.
The main primary drivers for U.S. semiconductor companies in locating facilities overseas and for offshoring semiconductor design is to reduce labor cost
For example the cost of employing a design engineer in Ireland, Taiwan, China, or India has been estimated to be 75 to 90 percent of that the U.S.
Between 2000 – 2003 the number of engineers employed in the U.S. decreased from approximately 76,000 to 72000 while the number of overseas engineers employed by U.S. companies increased from approximately 20,000 to 30,000
The Democrats chairing on the Committee on Science and Technology posted at the time the following comments:
…offshoring has begun to strike at the very high-tech jobs that we believed U.S. workers would move to fill as blue-collar opportunities shifted to other countries. A Cable News Network report in early March 2006 noted that 500,000 American jobs have migrated to India in recent years. That number is expected to triple in the next two years as American companies seek to cuts costs and streamline business. India is but one example of a country that seems to be gaining employment at the expense of American workers. Over the last six years, the U.S. has lost [nearly]…3 million jobs due to offshoring.
Not surprisingly with their big money and corporate members, representative organizations such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and some think tanks like the Heritage Foundation are strong supporters of outsourcing. What else should we expect given their clientele?
The other day KAW posted an outline entitled “Corporate Takeover of America” by Accuracy_IT. An anonymous reader wrote they were disturbed by the outline, viewing it as an attack on the Republicans and defending his party. Granted, the outline delineates a Republican strategy but I suggest this strategy applies equally to the Democrats by replacing each of the conservative leaning aspects of the strategy with the corresponding liberal or Democratic leaning equivalents. After the Corporate Takeover had been posted to the site by Virgil I exchanged email communications with the author, who wishes to remain anonymous, and they explained the outline was written about 5 or 6 year ago, around the same time of the above event, and described themselves as an unemployed programmer unable to find meaningful work since their job was outsourced a few years ago. I strongly recommend studying the outline for the strategy it represents with an open mind.
In returning to our story I’m sure some folks in Washington had good intentions but we all know what the road to hell is paved with. Obviously not much came of the big ruckus over that Commerce report. It effectively was shut away in that crammed closet of dirty secrets with everything returning to business as usual, and no real changes.
Concerning all those government organizations and private companies working on counterterrorism projects that the Post report refers to, Skousen writes, “Once again, the series tells us nothing about the substance of what they do, much of which is unsavory and illegal.”
Skousen goes on to say, “What [the Post report] won’t tell you is that almost a third of these [NSA] operations are dedicated to black operations against Americans and other Western governments who need to be surveilled in order to control them and keep them from resisting the agenda of the New World Order. Much expense is allocated to spying on the unsavory private behavior of Congressmen, and even State officials–building compromising dossiers on people who influence the political process so they can be coerced into compliance when necessary.”
Skousen also chides the Post report for failing “to show how connected certain companies are to the mercenary contractor explosion that is growing into a force that will eventually be used to threaten individual liberties at home. The Powers That Be don’t need to hire foreign armies to clamp down on American dissidents. They are training hundreds of thousands of mercenary Americans to do it and using foreign wars to sort out who is ruthless enough or unprincipled enough to take orders without questions–similar to the way the Nazis sorted and selected those who would form the Brownshirt and SS brigades.”
In short, while claiming to expose the federal government’s “hidden world,” the Post report actually does little to uncover the illegal and dark activities that Washington employs against the US citizenry, and by so doing serves more to cover up this sinister activity. Even so, do you not find it more than a little interesting just how few media sources did anything to pick up the Post report? Did you read any of this in your local paper? Did you see anything of this on CNN or Fox News? Come on, folks! You are aware that most of the media outlets (including network television) in this country obtain the vast majority of their “news” from The New York Times and The Washington Post, are you not? So, how convenient is it that this report (such as it is) was virtually ignored?
As I’ve said in speaking engagements–both large and small–all over America, We have more to fear from Washington, D.C., than from Tehran or Baghdad, or from any other foreign entity. America’s founders understood this and tried to warn the American people accordingly. For example, Daniel Webster warned, “There is no nation on earth powerful enough to accomplish our overthrow. Our destruction, should it come at all, will be from another quarter. From the inattention of the people to the concerns of their government, from their carelessness and negligence. I must confess that I do apprehend some danger. I fear that they may place too implicit a confidence in their public servants and fail properly to scrutinize their conduct; that in this way they may be made the dupes of designing men and become the instruments of their own undoing.”
On July 12, Niall Ferguson, an historian of empire, warned that the American empire could collapse suddenly from weakness brought on by its massive debts and that such a collapse could be closer than we think.
Deaf, dumb, and blind, Washington policymakers prattle on about “thirty more years of war.”
What will all of your assets do for your future and your childrens future if this comes true?
I know you think it won’t happen, but millions of us never thought the giant corporations would put the people that for generations made their growth possible, out of work!
As society broke down, the police became warlords. The state police broke apart, and the officers were subsumed into the local forces of their communities. The newly formed tribes expanded to encompass the relatives and friends of the police.
The dollar had collapsed as world reserve currency in 2012 when the worsening economic depression made it clear to Washington’s creditors that the federal budget deficit was too large to be financed except by the printing of money.
With the dollar’s demise, import prices skyrocketed. As Americans were unable to afford foreign-made goods, the transnational corporations that were producing offshore for US markets were bankrupted, further eroding the government’s revenue base.
The government was forced to print money in order to pay its bills, causing domestic prices to rise rapidly. Faced with hyperinflation, Washington took recourse in terminating Social Security and Medicare and followed up by confiscating the remnants of private pensions. This provided a one-year respite, but with no more resources to confiscate, money creation and hyperinflation resumed.
Organized food deliveries broke down when the government fought hyperinflation with fixed prices and the mandate that all purchases and sales had to be in US paper currency. Unwilling to trade appreciating goods for depreciating paper, goods disappeared from stores.
Washington responded as Lenin had done during the “war communism” period of Soviet history. The government sent troops to confiscate goods for distribution in kind to the population. This was a temporary stop-gap until existing stocks were depleted, as future production was discouraged. Much of the confiscated stocks became the property of the troops who seized the goods.
Goods reappeared in markets under the protection of local warlords. Transactions were conducted in barter and in gold, silver, and copper coins.
Other clans organized around families and individuals who possessed stocks of food, bullion, guns and ammunition. Uneasy alliances formed to balance differences in clan strengths. Betrayals quickly made loyalty a necessary trait for survival.
Large scale food and other production broke down as local militias taxed distribution as goods moved across local territories. Washington seized domestic oil production and refineries, but much of the government’s gasoline was paid for safe passage across clan territories.
Most of the troops in Washington’s overseas bases were abandoned. As their resource stocks were drawn down, the abandoned soldiers were forced into alliances with those with whom they had been fighting.
Washington found it increasingly difficult to maintain itself. As it lost control over the country, Washington was less able to secure supplies from abroad as tribute from those Washington threatened with nuclear attack. Gradually other nuclear powers realized that the only target in America was Washington. The more astute saw the writing on the wall and slipped away from the former capital city.
When Rome began her empire, Rome’s currency consisted of gold and silver coinage. Rome was well organized with efficient institutions and the ability to supply troops in the field so that campaigns could continue indefinitely, a monopoly in the world of Rome’s time.
When hubris sent America in pursuit of overseas empire, the venture coincided with the offshoring of American manufacturing, industrial, and professional service jobs and the corresponding erosion of the government’s tax base, with the advent of massive budget and trade deficits, with the erosion of the fiat paper currency’s value, and with America’s dependence on foreign creditors and puppet rulers.
Rome’s corruption became the strength of her enemies, and the Western Empire was overrun.
America’s collapse occurred when government ceased to represent the people and became the instrument of a private oligarchy. Decisions were made in behalf of short-term profits for the few at the expense of unmanageable liabilities for the many. Overwhelmed by liabilities, the government collapsed.
Globalism had run its course. Life reformed on a local basis.
BP is starting over. It just named a new American president and its finances are looking up. BP’s second-quarter report showed surprisingly strong revenues of $75.9 billion, beating Wall Street’s estimates. (This includes a $32.2 billion writedown along with the $20 billion liability fund that the Obama Administration wanted.) The company has started to sell $30 billion of its assets to ensure it has all the money it needs to pay any liability claims. No wonder several Wall Street analysts are suggesting BP stock as a terrific buy.
It doesn’t seem to matter BP was responsible for the worst environmental disaster in American history. Consumers worldwide – including Americans – continue to slurp up its oil.
But wait a minute. If BP emerges from this debacle fatter and happier than anyone imagined a few months ago, whatever happened to the idea of corporate accountability? Does this mean any giant corporation can wreak havoc and then get back to business as usual?
Corporations aren’t people. They have no brains, no consciences, no capacity for intent or guilt. Every one of their moveable parts can be replaced, just like BP’s former CEO Tony Hayward was replaced. Corporate accountability and responsibility are meaningless concepts. Corporations exist for only one purpose: to make money.
If we want corporations to act differently, we have to force them to do so through laws that are fully enforced and through penalties higher than the economic benefits of thwarting the laws.
Here’s the real outrage: In the wake of the BP spill, essentially no laws have been changed – not even a ridiculously low cap on damages private parties can collect from oil companies. Senate Republican leaders said Wednesday they wouldn’t support a bill retroactively removing the liability cap; and not even Democrats Mary Landrieu (D-La) and Mark Begich (D-Alaska) will support it.
Why isn’t Congress doing more – not only removing the cap on civil liability but also raising the level of penalties oil companies have to pay for violating safety and environmental regulations, permanently prohibiting deep-water drilling, and enacting a carbon tax?
Because of Big Oil’s political clout.
The same anthropomorphic fallacy that accords human attributes to giant corporations like BP distorts clear thinking about how to limit their political influence.
Consider the grotesque Supreme Court decision earlier this year in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which gave corporations the status of people with First Amendment rights to spend unlimited amounts of money on political ads. Citizens United ranks right up there with Bush v. Gore and Dred Scott as the most brainless and irresponsible Supreme Court decisions in history.
In March, the District of Columbia Court of Appeals decided that in light of Citizens United, there was no longer any basis for limiting contributions to so-called independent committees set up to support or oppose particular candidates. (Such committees are known as 527’s, after a loophole clause in the campaign finance laws.) The old contribution limit was $69,900 every two years. Now even that’s gone.
And the Federal Elections Commission has just interpreted these two court decisions to mean corporations, not just individuals, can now give unlimited amounts of money to 527’s.
To top it off, Tuesday the Senate failed (by only a few votes) to pass the “Disclose Act,” that would have forced corporate sponsors of campaign ads to reveal themselves and not hide behind innocuous sounding names like “Americans for America.” The bill also would have prohibited campaign ads run by U.S. subsidiaries of foreign companies. (Think BP.)
Now all the limits are gone and the gloves are completely off. Even BP, incorporated in the UK, is officially free influence American politics to its heart’s content.
The will of the American people is being subordinated to the demands of giant money-making machines called global corporations that can now spend or threaten to spend unlimited amounts of money in support of any politician willing to help them make more and against any who might cause them to make less.
This is the final lesson of BP.
What should you do? As with the loophole-ridden finance reform law, and the new health law that richly rewards Big Pharma — get angry, not cynical. Commit to getting big money out of politics, even if it takes us years.
I was just barely old enough to join the navy on 13 Oct 1976 and I believe the Vietnam war was over by then.
As a child growing up in the country, TV was a luxury during that time frame and living way out in the country surrounded by the hills, we didn’t get more then a few channels if memory serves me correctly, so Vietnam meant nothing to me as a kid because I had not been exposed to it.
So I don’t know who was right or wrong or any of that stuff, but lately I’ve been getting the feeling that the same class of people that sold out our troops are once again massing their forces, led by people like Mish and others.
The sad thing is, I agree with him that we should not be over there.
Not because I don’t believe in our cause, but because I believe in this tailgate sticker I’ve been seeing lately in the emails that I get and I don’t naively believe that these people have the slightest interest in helping us and that they simply think, stupid Americans.
Click to zoom in
I tell you what you want and you give me money?
So I will tell you what you want and you can give me money!
Stupid Americans!
President Barack Obama faces renewed concern about his Afghanistan war strategy after leaked military documents suggested Pakistan’s main intelligence agency secretly aided the Taliban and others the U.S is trying to defeat.
Disclosure of the documents, as Congress this week considers funding for the U.S. troop buildup in Afghanistan, underscored questions about the war while many lawmakers prepare to go home to campaign in August.
Some of the 92,000 classified reports, disclosed July 25 by the website Wikileaks, say that members of Pakistan’s Inter- Services Intelligence Directorate helped the Taliban and other Islamic rebels. The documents, covering 2004 through 2009, were reported by the New York Times, the London-based Guardian and the German magazine Der Spiegel, which said Wikileaks provided them the reports three weeks ago.
The leaked documents “raise serious questions about the reality of America’s policy toward Pakistan and Afghanistan,” said Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat. “Those policies are at a critical stage,” and the documents “make the calibrations needed to get the policy right more urgent.”
‘Not Pretty’
“I’ve been to a number of briefings and I’ve always been provided a more upbeat picture than the one” depicted by the documents, said Representative James McGovern, a Massachusetts Democrat who opposes Obama’s Afghan policy. “The picture that is painted here is not pretty.”
Obama announced in December plans to send another 30,000 combat troops to Afghanistan, and Congress is under pressure to pass legislation paying for the buildup before taking its monthlong summer recess. Obama has said he will start to draw down U.S. forces in July 2011 and give more security responsibility to the Afghans, depending on conditions.
Polls show support for the war waning. Almost 6 in 10 respondents in a Bloomberg National Poll conducted July 9-12 said Afghanistan is a lost cause.
Also, 60 percent of Americans surveyed thought the withdrawal of forces should start in July 2011 even if the situation in Afghanistan remains unstable. The poll of 1,004 adults had a margin of error of 3.1 percentage points.
The document leak constitutes the “the largest single unauthorized release of currently classified records — multiple times the volume of the Pentagon Papers” about the Vietnam war leaked to newspapers in 1971, said Steve Aftergood, director for the Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy.
Arizona Senator John McCain, ranking Republican on the Armed Services Committee, said, “We are finally beginning to address many of the problems highlighted within these leaked documents.” McCain generally supports the war effort, though he opposes setting a date to begin a withdrawal.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, said she doesn’t believe the leak will affect support for the war-funding legislation because the group of reports “predates the president’s new policy.”
The Senate last week approved $60 billion to fund the troop buildup in Afghanistan and other needs. The House version, passed earlier this month after Democratic leaders used parliamentary tactics to push it through, included funds to help states avoid having to fire teachers.
The House plans to debate a nonbinding resolution by Representative Dennis Kucinich, an Ohio Democrat, seeking removal of U.S. troops from Pakistan.
The documents show it is “indisputable” that “our nation has fallen into a trap of continued occupation and escalation that can only lead to more tragedy,” Kucinich said.
Second-quarter earnings reports are coming in, and they’re making Wall Street smile. Corporate profits are up. And big American companies are sitting on a gigantic pile of money. The 500 largest non-financial firms held almost a trillion dollars in the second quarter, and that money pile is growing larger this quarter. Profits that plummeted in the recession have bounced back. Big businesses have recovered almost 90 percent of what they lost.
So with all this money and profit, they’ll start hiring again, right? Wrong – for three reasons.
First, lots of their profits are coming from their overseas operations. So that’s where they’re investing and expanding production.
GM now sells more cars in China than it does in the US, but makes most of them there. The company now employs 32,000 hourly workers in China. But only 52,000 GM hourly workers remain in the United States – down from 468,000 in 1970.
GM isn’t just hiring low-tech assembly workers in China. Last week the firm broke ground there on a $250 million advanced technology center to develop batteries and other alternative energy sources.
You and I and other American taxpayers still own over 60 percent of GM. We bought GM to save GM jobs, remember?
GM officials say no American taxpayer money is being used to expand in China. But money is fungible. Because of our generosity, GM can now use the dollars it doesn’t have to spend in the United States meeting its American payrolls and repaying its creditors, for new investments in China.
I admire Joseph E. Stiglitz, because he has a social conscience and a sense of justice, the absence of which turns economists into monsters. Despite his virtues and Nobel Prize, Stiglitz sometimes falls down as an economist. Readers of my new book, How The Economy Was Lost, will be aware that I take him to task for the Solow-Stiglitz production function, which seriously misleads economics about the scarcity of nature’s capital.
Another of Stiglitz’s shortcomings, one that he shares with most economists, is his habit of reifying the market economy. The market is a social organization. The results of market activity reflect the behavior of the human participants in the market. When economists reify the market, they attribute the behavior, ethics, and morality—or lack thereof—of humans to the market itself. Thus, Stiglitz describes human failures as “market failures,” and he asks in his new book, Freefall,“why didn’t the market exercise discipline on bad corporate governance and bad incentive structures?”
Social institutions are inanimate. They do not possess life and cannot impose good outcomes on human action.
Libertarians also reify markets, but instead of blaming markets for human failures, they imbue the market with human virtues and even with the super-human virtue of producing results that human intelligence cannot improve upon. Economists’ “risk models” for which Nobel Prizes have been awarded and Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan attributed the social institution with economic wisdom beyond man’s.
It is likely that the practice of reifying the market economy developed as a form of shorthand. It was convenient to say that the market did this and that rather than to have to describe the human interactions that produced the results. The market was transformed from an abstraction into a life form and became the actor instead of the humans operating within the institution.
If the outcomes are good, libertarians attribute the good results to the market’s virtues; if bad, libertarians blame human interference—government regulation. Economists of Stiglitz’s persuasion see it in the opposite way. Good results are produced by regulation; bad results are the result of allowing the market to make decisions on its own.
This way of thinking, which reifies a social institution, is ingrained in economics. It is the source of enormous confusion and has resulted in a pointless long-running ideological battle that Stiglitz calls “a battle of ideas.”
It is possible to clear away the confusion. First, understand that a free market is one in which prices are free to respond to supply and demand. Economists of all persuasions understand that to fix a price below the price at which supply and demand equate results in shortages. Economists have learned this from rent control. Fixing a price above the price at which supply and demand equate results in surpluses. Economists have learned this from agricultural subsidies. A free market does not mean a market in which human behavior is not regulated. A free market is one in which supply and demand are permitted to equate.
Second, understand that regulation regulates human behavior, not the market. It is the actors in the market who are charged with regulatory infractions, not the institution itself. Regulation is necessary because of human faults, such as greed, fraud, carelessness, not because of market faults. Regulation is necessary because of human failure, not because of market failure.
Third, understand that the problem of regulation is that it is done by flawed humans. Human flaws do not disappear by moving human action from the economy to government. Most likely the flaws worsen as government decisions are often unaccountable. Many economists assume that regulators act in the public interest. However, as George Stigler, another Nobel Prizewinner, pointed out several decades ago, regulators are invariably captured by the industries that they regulate.
There are endless examples of regulators—indeed, entire governments—captured by the private interests that they are supposed to regulate. For example, in a recent subscriber’s edition of CounterPunch (June 16-30), Jeffrey St. Clair describes in detail the incestuous relationship between the government’s Minerals Management Service and the oil industry. An agency charged with regulating the impact of oil drilling on the environment became “a bureaucratic facilitator of big oil.” Thus, the environmental catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico and looming catastrophes along Alaska’s fragile coastline.
Indeed, economists themselves and academics are often captured by private interest groups and turned into shills. In How The Economy Was Lost, I accuse economists of shilling for transnational corporations when they falsely describe jobs offshoring as the beneficial workings of free trade. Like the Israel Lobby, corporations have found that money will purchase professors, academic departments and think tanks, as well as journalists.
The problem that the US economy faces is far more serious than the financial crisis resulting from financial deregulation. The reason that traditional monetary and fiscal policies cannot produce an economic recovery is that so much of the US economy has been moved offshore. As the jobs have departed, there is no work to which low interest rates and massive government spending can recall workers.
I’ll put myself up against your geniuses and I never even graduated high school when it comes to solving actual business problems, not your garden variety tests that don’t make a dollar or two!
A China-based outsourcing company called Bleum requires that all job applicants for computer science positions have a minimum IQ of 140. Bleum recently announced that it will hire Americans who are willing to move to China — but, according to Bleum, it couldn’t find enough Americans that met its minimum requirements for intelligence. Bleum decided to lower its minimum IQ to 125 to compensate for the weak talent pool in the United States:
An IQ test is the first screen for any US or Chinese applicant.
“The lower IQ threshold for new US graduates reflects the fact that the pool of US talent available to the company is smaller than the pool of Chinese talent, Bleum said.”
Second-quarter earnings reports are coming in, and they’re making Wall Street smile. Corporate profits are up. And big American companies are sitting on a gigantic pile of money. The 500 largest non-financial firms held almost a trillion dollars in the second quarter, and that money pile is growing larger this quarter. Profits that plummeted in the recession have bounced back. Big businesses have recovered almost 90 percent of what they lost.
So with all this money and profit, they’ll start hiring again, right? Wrong – for three reasons.
First, lots of their profits are coming from their overseas operations. So that’s where they’re investing and expanding production.
GM now sells more cars in China than it does in the US, but makes most of them there. The company now employs 32,000 hourly workers in China. But only 52,000 GM hourly workers remain in the United States – down from 468,000 in 1970.
GM isn’t just hiring low-tech assembly workers in China. Last week the firm broke ground there on a $250 million advanced technology center to develop batteries and other alternative energy sources.
You and I and other American taxpayers still own over 60 percent of GM. We bought GM to save GM jobs, remember?
GM officials say no American taxpayer money is being used to expand in China. But money is fungible. Because of our generosity, GM can now use the dollars it doesn’t have to spend in the United States meeting its American payrolls and repaying its creditors, for new investments in China.
Second, big U.S. businesses are investing their cash in labor-saving technologies. This boosts their productivity, but not their payrolls.
Last Friday, for example, Ford reported a $2.6 billion second-quarter profit. The firm is already more than two-thirds the way to equaling its record 1999 profits. But due to labor-saving technologies, Ford now has half as many employees as it did a decade ago.
Wall Street analysts are happy with Ford’s “commitment to keeping capacity in check,” according to the Wall Street Journal. Ford shares rose 5.2 percent Friday. “Keeping capacity in check” is the Street’s way of saying “no new hiring.” In fact, the Street is advising investors to sell the stocks of companies that talk openly of expanding capacity.
Finally, corporations are using their pile of money to pay dividends to their shareholders and buy back their own stock – thereby pushing up share prices.
Last Friday, GE announced it would raise its dividend by 20 percent and reinstate its share-buyback plan. It’s GE’s first dividend increase since the company cut its dividend in early 2009. As a result, GE shares are up more than 5% in the past few days.
Bottom line: Higher corporate profits no longer lead to higher employment. We’re witnessing a great decoupling of company profits from jobs.
The next supply-side economist who tells you companies need more incentive (i.e. lower taxes) before they’ll hire is living on another planet.
The reality is this: Big American companies may never rehire large numbers of workers. And they won’t even begin to think about hiring until they know American consumers will buy their products. The problem is, American consumers won’t start buying against until they know they have reliable paychecks.
The SEC alleges that Dell did not disclose to investors large exclusivity payments the company received from Intel Corporation to not use central processing units (CPUs) manufactured by Intel’s main rival. It was these payments rather than the company’s management and operations that allowed Dell to meet its earnings targets. After Intel cut these payments, Dell again misled investors by not disclosing the true reason behind the company’s decreased profitability.
Dell Inc. agreed to pay a $100 million penalty to settle the SEC’s charges. Michael Dell and Rollins each agreed to pay a $4 million penalty, and Schneider agreed to pay $3 million, to settle the SEC’s charges against them. Dunning and Jackson also agreed to settle the SEC’s charges.
Only 100 million and no arrest of the top executives of Intel and CEO for violating the monopoly laws?
Surely if you conspire with your client to prevent them from using a competitors product that will violate all of the fraud laws
Not only that, but apparently they were cooking the books too and it only cost them 100 million?
What about jail time for these executives?
But hey, this is a great country.
Dell can cook their books and conspire to put another company out of business and Apple can violate the sweatshop laws by making the Chinese people work at tasks that Apples lowest employee wouldn’t do and they can get by with it.
I’ve been hearing it said that the government regulators were in bed with the corporations and I’m sure believing it after reading stories such as this one, because if you and I had done this, we would be sitting next door to madoff in the slammer!
Virgil, this latest post of yours disturbed me deeply. I hope you don’t believe it yourself, because upon examination it is all a crock, and the name Accuracy-IT obviously has nothing to do with accuracy and everything to do with the Democrat agenda. Let’s take a look at some of the presumptions, and how facts prove them false.
First, the assumption of the Republicans as the Party of Business may have been true 50 or more years ago, but the facts today don’t support that presumption. Do the research you’ve done so well in the past, and you’ll find out that the real fat-cats of the corporate world — Goldman-Sachs, British Petroleum, Exxon-Mobil, Microsoft, and Disney, just to name a few — gave the bulk of their money to the Democrats, not the Republicans, and there’s a reason for that. The vast bulk of corporate money went to Barack Obama, not John McCain. Again, there’s a reason for that. Remember, these are the same people who, having become rich via the traditional route of American free enterprise, now export American jobs to India and China so they can make even more money at the expense of their own country.
The idea that groups like the Heritage Foundation, of which I’ve been a member for well over a decade, the Cato Institute, political conservatives, libertarians, evangelical Christians, and so on, are somehow in cahoots with big business collaborating on a corporate takeover is an outright fallacy that only a liberal Democrat could believe. Virgil, these are the people who are feverishly working to preserve the very freedom that allowed you to become successful in the past — the freedom that Obama & Co. are now doing everything they can to extinguish. In like manner, the idea of smear campaigns being conducted against Democrats sounds for all the world to me like that of sucking the blood of Dracula. Look and see for yourself what’s happening: It’s the Democrats who routinely smear anyone and everyone who gets in their way, with distortions, half-truths, and outright lies. Ask yourself this question: Is it Fox News that’s currently trying to shut down the “mainstream” news networks, or is it the other way around? What organizations like Heritage and Cato are trying to do is simply put forward the truth that the Tokyo Rose Propaganda Group, as you so aptly named them, are trying to cover up by either under-reporting, misreporting, or simply not reporting at all.
Don’t misunderstand me here to be saying that the Republicans are always on the side of the angels. You and I know this isn’t so. I’m a registered Republican myself, but when Republicans start sounding like Democrats they lose me. When their agenda becomes go-along-to-get-along, they lose me. When they talk of bipartisanship, they lose me. Bipartisanship is an idea which, like the Queen’s tests in “Once Upon A Mattress,” looks fair, sounds fair, seems fair, and isn’t fair. What it really means, as it is currently understood, is that Democrats be allowed to set the agenda, and that Republicans cave on as many issues as possible while the Democrats concede nothing. That, my friend, is anything but fair.
The American free enterprise system isn’t perfect by any means, but it is — to my knowledge, at least — the best system yet devised to make possible the upward mobility that traditionally has distinguished America from the world and made her the example for others to follow. This is the very same example that Barack Obama has always despised, and, as a result, now presents to the rest of the world the picture of a president and a government fundamentally at odds with the American people. If Obama and his cronies succeed in their mission to make America a communist country, you, I, and everybody else will never again have the opportunities to succeed we once had. Don’t believe for a minute that the Democrats are on the side of the little guy. They aen’t. It is rather the Democrats who, by advancing an agenda of high taxes, big government, and government dependency, seek to stifle initiative and keep the small man small. The real big boys of the corporate world know this, and it is for this reason that they support the Democrats — not the Republicans.
We’re not in a double-dip recession yet. We’re in a one and a half dip recession.
Consumer confidence is down. Retail sales are down. Home sales are down. Permits for single-family starts are down. The average work week is down. The only things not down are inventories – unsold stuff is piling up in warehouses and inventories of unsold homes are rising – and defaults on loans.
The 1.5 dip recession should be causing alarm bells to ring all over official Washington. It should cause deficit hawks to stop squawking about future debt, blue-dog Democrats to stop acting like Republicans, and mainstream Democrats to get some backbone.
The 1.5 dip recession should cause the President to demand a large-scale national jobs program including a new WPA that gets millions of Americans back to work even if government has to pay their wages directly. Included would be zero-interest loans to strapped states and locales, so they didn’t have to cut vital services and raise taxes. They could repay when the economy picked up and revenues came in. The national jobs program would also include a one-year payroll tax holiday on the first $20,000 of income.
The President should stop talking and acting on anything else – not the deficit, not energy, not the environment, not immigration, not implementing the health care law, not education. He should make the whole upcoming mid-term election a national referendum on putting Americans back to work, and his jobs bill. Are you for it or against it?
But none of this is happening. The hawks and blue dogs are still commanding the attention. Herbert Hoover’s ghost seems to have captured the nation’s capital. We’re back to 1932 (or 1937) and the prevailing sentiment is government can’t and mustn’t do anything but aim to reduce the deficit, even though the economy is going down.
It looks like there’ll be an extension of unemployment benefits. (If it weren’t for the human suffering involved, I wish the Republicans had been forced to filibuster that bill all summer and show the nation just how much they care about people without jobs.) But the fiscal stimulus resulting from this will be tiny. Jobless benefits are humane but they alone don’t get jobs back.
And what about the Fed? It’s the last game in town. The 1.5 dip recession should cause Ben Bernanke to revert to buying mortgage-backed securities, buying Treasury bills, buying anything that will get more money into circulation.
But the Fed chair continues to talk about pulling money out of the system and raising short-term rates as the economy improves. During Wednesday’s appearance before Congress he made it clear monetary policy won’t be loosened; it just won’t be tightened for a while. And he reiterated that deficits were “unsustainable.”
He admitted unemployment would probably remain high for a long time, and the likelihood of growth was “weighted to the downside,” which in Fed-Speak means we’re still in trouble. And he said the Fed still has the tools to do what’s needed if the economy needs more help.
But would he use the tools now? No. “We need to look at them carefully to make sure we’re comfortable with any steps that we take.” This is like the captain of the Titanic looking carefully at his lifeboats to make sure he’s comfortable with using them as the ship starts sinking.
This may not come across in the correct format as it was cut and pasted.
If not, you can read the original by clicking here
GOALS: I. Increase profits by decreasing expenses.
II. Bring government on the side of business.
III. Reduce/eliminate employee and consumer impediments
(regulations).
IV. Move U.S. government towards subservient position
underneath the WTO.
V. Control world markets by employing the WTO as their
surrogate.
OBJECTIVE 1: Control the “message” via numerous political action
committees and lobbyists.
* Cato Institute
* Americans for Tax Reform
* The Club for Growth
* Business Roundtable
* U.S. Chamber of Commerce
* Heritage Foundation
* Competitive Enterprise Institute
OBJECTIVE 2: Join forces with other organizations to create a large
powerful voting block.
* Evangelicals (Issues: abortion, prayer in schools).
* Neo-conservatives (Issues: continuing cold war,
having an enemy, imperialism).
* Gun rights lobby (Issues: any form of gun control).
* Libertarians (Issue: freedom).
OBJECTIVE 3: Pick a political party to hijack and disable the other.
* Select Republicans as the traditional party of business.
* Attack & smear the Democratic party and sources of
income (lawyers, teachers, unions).
* Disable lawyers via “tort reform”.
* Disable teachers via “NO CHILD’S BEHIND LEFT ACT” and
criticizing the educational systems by claiming American children ‘underperform’.
* Disable unions by blaming them for offshoring due to
high labor rates.
OBJECTIVE 4: Hold groups together by creating common alliances and
mutual ‘enemies’.
* Continue fighting the ‘Cold War’ via ‘terrorism’ (neo-conservatives, Evangelicals).
* Maintain presence in the middle east (Evangelicals, neo-conservatives).
* Anti big government (Libertarians, neo-conservatives).
* Anti tax (corporations, Libertarians, neo-conservatives, Evangelicals)
* Pro gun stance (Gun rights lobby, Libertarians, Evangelicals).
OBJECTIVE 5: Maintain control through the (Republican) party.
* Withhold support from any republican candidate not supporting key issues.
* Threaten any member via RNC funding cut to vote as required (i.e. tax cuts).
* Ostracize members to fail to conform.
STRATEGY I: Control costs by employing major cuts in employee related expenses.
Social Security “Reform”
GOAL: To eliminate the employer 6.4% share of SS
contributions
METHOLD: Push private accounts similar to IRAs, functioning the same.
Reduce overtime pay expense:
GOAL: To eliminate overtime pay (time and a half) for all medium to high paid professionals and workers.
METHOLD: Reclassify workers as “professionals”. Install a cap on overtime pay at $23,200. Sell to Americans as an overtime pay “guarantee” by claiming anyone under the cap will have their overtime pay guaranteed. This greatly limited the number of workers eligible.
Reduce labor costs via Cheap Labor – Professional Class
GOAL: Replace high priced American labor with cheap foreign labor.
METHODS:
1) Convince congress via campaign contributions there is a “worker shortage” and that visas as needed to ease the shortage.
2) Control the message via by using PACs and lobbyists.
3) Employ spin: use studies manipulated to “show facts”.
4) Use only facts supporting your cause.
5) Discredit facts not supporting your cause.
6) Attack & smear anyone employing facts not supporting your
cause.
7) Attack the media as having “liberal bias”.
Reduce labor costs via Cheap Labor – Working Class
GOAL: Replace high priced American labor with illegal aliens.
METHODS:
1) Convince congress via campaign contributions there is a “worker shortage” and that visas as needed to ease the shortage.
2) Control the message via by using PACs and lobbyists.
3) Employ spin: use studies manipulated to “show facts”.
4) Make case that America is based upon immigrant labor.
5) Use only facts supporting your cause.
6) Discredit facts not supporting your cause.
7) Attack & smear anyone employing facts not supporting your
cause. Attack the media as having “liberal bias”.
Cheap Labor – Outsourcing
GOAL: Replace high priced American labor by sending jobs outside the country.
METHODS:
1) Claim that labor regulations get in the way of productivity.
2) Claim that unions force jobs offshore via exorbitant
demands.
3) Claim that the labor force is not as well educated as 3rd world countries.
4) Announce your company cannot compete here in America .
5) Contribute heavily to influence Washington politics via hard and soft money.
and soft money.
6) Combine lobbying and contributions. Make it clear the well will dry up without sympathetic legislation.
STRATEGY II: Reduce/eliminate regulations
Reduce/eliminate discrimination complaints
GOAL: Eliminate costly complaints by having government
dismiss them.
METHOD: Appoint leadership to DOL with history of being
unsympathetic to labor.
Reduce/eliminate overtime pay complaints
GOAL: Eliminate costly litigation via clearly defined legislation
eliminating overtime pay.
METHOD: Contribute to congressional campaigns and soft money
funding. Use lobby groups and PACs to create a clear understanding that “outdated regulations” need to be addressed and fixed.
Reduce/eliminate health insurance
GOAL: Eliminate costly employee health benefit plans by
replacing them with “Health Savings Accounts” (HSAs).
METHOD:
1) Contribute to congressional campaigns and soft money
funding. Use lobby groups and PACs to create a clear understanding that health benefits are burdensome and need to be addressed and fixed.
2) Bring up HSAs with every opportunity. Keep it in the news.
Reduce/eliminate EPA regulations and enforcements.
GOAL: Eliminate costly regulations by having government stop
enforcement.
METHODS:
1) Appoint leadership to EPA with history of being unsympathetic to environmental issues.
2) Appoint leadership to EPA from the lobby industry for industry polluters.
3) Cut funds for enforcement.
4) Issue presidential orders to stop enforcement.
STRATEGY III: Sell the agenda.
GOAL: Use lobbyists to get your message to congress.
METHODS:
1) Hire lobby firms to “educate” congress with check in hand.
2) Move former congressmen into lobby groups to increase
influence.
GOAL: Use the media to control your message to America .
METHODS:
1) Where ever possible purchase media and control the message.
2) Use advertising to promote industries (pharmaceuticals, energy, etc)
3) Defend industry attacks by attacking the media as having “liberal bias”.
4) Attack & smear the minority party with ads during elections.
5) ALWAYS claim the agenda will “create jobs”.
6) Claim that trade agreements open markets which
create jobs.
7) No matter how many factories close keep claiming jobs are being created. Tell Americans what you want them to think.
GOAL: Use religion to pursue corporate goals.
METHOD:
1) Get TV evangelists on board and active.
2) Preach the “gospel” of tax cuts and “failed” social programs.
STRATEGY IV: Build momentum towards the New World Order.
GOAL: Move all government towards membership in the WTO.
METHODS:
1) Make use of Council on Foreign Relations members.
2) Convince congress of the desire for trade agreements.
3) Push towards open borders between adjacent countries.
4) Claim labor shortage as validation for open borders.
5) Include mandatory visas in trade agreements and force into
WTO compliance.
GOAL: Build momentum in stealth in order to avoid alarming citizens.
METHODS:
1) Employ ‘worker shortage’ argument.
2) Use ‘best and brightest’ argument to seek cheap labor.
3) Tout outsourcing as good for the country because of cheap
goods.
4) Use trade agreements to tear down tariff borders.
5) Overlook physical borders but claim concern, hide
borderless goal.
6) Introduce North America as borderless.
7) Hide mandatory visas in trade agreements to force into
WTO compliance.
GOAL: Suppress any New World Order coverage and attack those critical.
METHODS
1) Deny the New World Order as “crazy conspiracy theory” which ended with the 3rd Reich.
2) Assure citizens of their sovereignty.
3) Attack & smear anyone critical of the New World Order.
4) Suppress any reports critical of trade agreements.
STRATEGY V: Control legislation.
GOAL: Insure corporate control by using funding.
METHODS:
1) Steady stream of PAC money.
2) CEO contributions.
3) Use money to encourage legislator voting patterns.
4) Use threat of money cutoff to intimidate congress.
5) Use financial resources to defeat opponents.
6) Use financial resources to get corporate shills elected.
GOAL: Manipulating the legislation process.
METHODS:
1) Hold votes open in violation of House rules past time 15 minute time limit, until arms can be twisted, promises made, and threats issued.
2) Threaten to use the “nuclear” option to thwart the centuries old filibuster.
3) Prevent the minority party from bringing legislation to the floor.
4) Use redistricting to push out minority members and improve majority rule.
5) No matter how good the legislation is for corporations insist it’s good for Americans.
STRATEGY VI: Use government to further corporate financial goals.
EXAMPLES:
1) Prescription drug plan written by pharmaceutical companies results in rising drug cost, rather than decrease.
2) Energy plan written by energy companies to provide tax cuts, extend drilling rights, & reduce regulations.
3) Tort reform written by medical companies and insurance providers to limit medical malpractice suits.
4) No bid contracts in Iraq that rewards defense contracts associated with members of the administration.
5) Transportation bill providing billions of dollars of congressional pork and used as a tool for re-election.
6) “Overtime reform” law billed as an overtime guarantee that actually takes it away from workers at a ratio of 10 losing overtime for 1 gaining.
7) Use visas to provide cheap labor (i.e. H-1B, L1, T1).
8) Encourage corporations to outsource, claiming it’s
“good
I’m trying to get caught up on some things tonight and out of habit, I always leave CNBC on, even though I don’t pay much attention to it when the market closes.
But in tonight’s segment on American Greed, they are talking about a person that is selling the body parts and telling the people that lost their loved one that their loved one was cremated all according to the rules, regulation, protocol, etc…
Can you go any lower than that?
Awhile back I watched the Michael Moore movie about capitalism and I was shocked when he explained the “Dead Peasant” policies that our corporations are taking out on their employees.
Can you go any lower than that?
And recently I read how workers in China are committing suicide while working indirectly for Apple among others and while researching that article I realize that our corporations here in America have found a way around the sweatshop laws that were enacted almost 100 years ago to the day and I’m thinking
Can you go any lower than that?
Today I no longer wonder how low we can go, because I’m not sure that anything would surprise me anymore.
For years now, since 2003 I have been watching more and more of our jobs go offshore and I’ve been watching our politicians play “Screw the people, I have to worry about my ties with big business” with the lives of the people that they swore to represent.
All the while that the people are losing everything, these same politicians from both sides of the aisle are getting richer and richer because they either have business ties to the corporations that are sending our jobs offshore, or their businesses do business one way or another with somebody, somewhere that has ties to these very large corporations.
Meanwhile the real casualty of war is the American laborer.
Doesn’t seem to matter if he or she makes 100,000 or less, because as long as companies like Apple and others can invest in Sweatshops such as Foxconn, it just gets worse and worse.
And how do these politicians from both sides of the aisle take care of the people that they swore to represent?
Well, you can rest assured that they do not approve the unemployment that these people desperately need just to survive because they can no longer find jobs.
So I was glad to hear you say that these politicians need to step up to the plate and take care of the American People, because you can rest assured that the American people are slowly waking up to the fact that the reason they can no longer find jobs is because of these politicians and these very large multinational corporations and the Tokyo Rose Propaganda Group that does not tell the truth to them.
Corporations, Lobbyist and their political toadies
By Mitch Gurney
July 18, 2010
Before proceeding with this posting I would like to give credit where credit is due. I didn’t coin the phrase “political toadies” but borrowed it from a two part commentary written by Charles Hugh Smith posted on his blog oftwoMinds.com. The two part articles are titled: The Con of the Decade Part I & The Con of the Decade Part II. His blog and the two articles are excellent reads. I love the phrase and thanks Charles…I hope it is alright if I employee it from time to time.
Most of us are aware corporations and other special interest groups legally provide money to our elected lawmaker’s via campaign and lobbying funding. And probably most understand why these entities lobby the hell out of Washington; to influence policy in their favor. In fact the Supreme Court recently ruled it was unconstitutional to place limits on the amount of corporate funding in that to do so would in essence restrict their voice.
Federal campaign contributions from lobbyists are slightly down this election cycle compared to the same time period before the last midterm election. But Democrats are pulling in more lobbyist cash — just as Republicans did when they held the majority in both houses of Congress.
The six-figure recipients include more Democrats than Republicans — 18 to 10 — but regardless of party, almost all of these recipients hold a leadership position in the House or Senate.
Dave Wenhold, [partner owner of lobbyist firm Miller/Wenhold Capital Strategies and] president of the American League of Lobbyists, said it’s not surprising that well-established politicians dominate the list.
“That’s just kind of the way it goes,” he said. “Some of these younger people… a lot of them haven’t really made their positions known. They’re kind of going along with party lines so you need to figure out where they are.”
Wenhold said lawmakers frequently invite lobbyists to fundraisers.
“We’re not out there actively soliciting to give this money away. The members of Congress are asking for it,” he said. “Of course, you can’t ban anybody from donating, but members of congress could simply stop asking registered lobbyists for donations.”
Lobbying is BIG business and it’s legal. Barry Ritholtz writing for The Big Picture highlights an article featured in the July 12, 2010 issue of Time Magazine that provides a glimpse into just how BIG and powerful lobbying is noting the title “The Best Laws Money Can Buy” and the subtitle tell you all you need to know:
“Why Lobbying Is Washington’s Best Bargain; Lobbyists say for just a few million, they can make clients billions:”
Ritholtzquotes the following from the Times article:
“Lobbyists [are] the best bargain in Washington. Capitol Tax Partners, for example, is one of 1,900 firms that house more than 11,000 lobbyists registered to operate in Washington. Last year, according to the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP), firms like Capitol Tax were paid a total of $3.49 billion for unraveling the mysteries of the tax code for a variety of businesses. According to Capitol Tax co-founder Lindsay Hooper, his firm provided “input and technical advice on various tax matters” to such clients as Morgan Stanley, 3M, Goldman Sachs, Chanel, Ford and the Private Equity Council, which is a trade group trying to head off a plan to increase taxes on what’s called carried interest, a form of income enjoyed by the heavy hitters who run venture-capital and other types of private-equity funds.”
Over the weekend I purchased a copy of the magazine and read the article. The online version of the Times article is a shortened abridged version and pretty skimpy on detail in comparison to the printed edition as Ritholtz notes:
The print edition specifically cites Derivative trading banks and Auto Dealers as examples of ROI. Derivatives trading banks spent $28 million, and got to avoid allocating $5 billion to $7 billion to back their trades. The gain in annual profits is about $3 billion — with the risk remaining on the taxpayers. A pretty nifty return on lobbying investment (minus the lobbyists soul burning in Hell for eternity — but that’s a small price to pay.
Auto Dealers made out even better: They dropped less than $10 million dollars ($6.3 million on lobbying, and an additional $3.4 million in campaign contributions). For their troubles, the dealers get to keep $20 billion each year in undisclosed added interest and fee kickbacks to over-priced loans.
The author of the Time article Steven Brill, a longtime journalist who founded The American Lawyer magazine, notes:
Time Warner, the parent company of TIME magazine, is…a client of [lobbyist firm] Capitol Tax Partners.
Complexity is the modern lobbyist’s greatest ally…”Complexity is our enemy,” says Elizabeth Warren, chair of the congressional panel overseeing the Troubled Asset Relief Program, who conceived one of the legislation’s marquee provisions — a consumer-protection agency to regulate mortgages, credit cards and other financial products. “The more complex these bills are,” she complains, “the more they can outgun us.”
The following quotes I pulled from the printed edition:
With respect to the debate over the Constitutionality of this activity and the recent Supreme Court’s ruling Mr Brill observes:
The Constitution is squarely on [the lobbyist] …side.
The First Amendment explicitly protects our rights to “petition the government” – more explicitly, in fact, than it protects many of the rights the courts have given me as I report and publish this article.
To run for office requires a great deal of money. In order to source these funds an environment has been created where elected officials seek and accept campaign and lobbyist funds as Mr Brill reports:
Beyond the resources lobbyist can deploy, there’s the campaign money they can supply. The average winning congressional campaign in 2010 is likely to cost about $1.5 million, requiring the incumbent to raise roughly $15k a week. Lobbyists not only contribute on their own but are the most important fundraisers in the money grind, because they serve as lawmaker’s links to the most promising donors: those with business interest related to each members committee assignments. So it was no surprise that as the financial-reform conference began its deliberations, the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP) reported that since 1989 the 43 members of the committee had received $112 million from donors associated with the finance, insurance and real estate industries. “You can say that lobbyists on the Hill are like lawyers in the courtroom and that the advocacy system produces the best result, says David Arkush, the director of Congress Watch. But in court you don’t have the lawyers and clients donating to the jury.”
Mr Brill interviews and quotes Dave Wenhold partner of Miller/Wenhold Capitol Strategies (mentioned above) that explains the lobbyist role:
“If you banned all lobbying tomorrow, the legislative process would grind to a halt,” says Wenhold. “You can call us special interest, but the ones who are especially interested are the ones who can explain the consequences of writing a bill this way or that way. We make the system work.”
A financial – services trade- association executive Brill interviewed and quotes but doesn’t name states:
“…lobbyists provide not only crucial policy input but also what he calls critical “technical assistance… (which Brill notes that “more cynical observers would call drafting the legislation”)…”Most members of Congress may know one or two issues well, if that. Then you have a 26 year old kid, maybe…30 …[who] went to a good law school, who’s on staff working 10 hours a day and is supposed to tell his boss how to do derivatives regulation or credit-card reform. Are you kidding?”
Mr Brill draws an analogy in how lawmakers work with lobbyist to that of a journalist working with their sources:
“In preparing for a story, a reporter is best served by listening to those on all sides so that he can weigh their best arguments.”
Brill quoting Congressman [Barney] Frank explains:
“A good legislator does the same thing with lobbyist, says Congressman Frank. “I feel better about a position when I can hear both sides…You use them to inform you.” he adds, “as long as they know that if they lie, they lose. They will never be allowed to come back to this office.”
Continuing Brill writes…“In fact, lawmakers turn to lobbyists to stage the debates” and quotes a Senate-committee lawyer who “played a key role in drafting some of the most arcane but big-money provisions of the [financial] reform bill as stating:
“I help my boss the most when I can play the good lobbyist off each other, just the way a judge or jury hears all the evidence and the lawyers’ arguments and then decides.”
The printed edition article is very informative and brings a balanced insight to the working relationship between lobbyist and politicians plus Brill makes recommendations on how to rein in this activity. I comprehend the difficulty lawmakers have as they struggle writing and deciding legislation that serves all of the needs for a diverse national and global society as complex as we have today. This task would seem more difficult given that in many cases the policy maker may not be any more informed on the issues then the average day citizen who elected them into office.
While I can find respect for the counsel lobbyist might bring to assist legislators in this process I have a very difficult time grasping why this exchange of ideas and recommendations also involves the exchange of cash that in essence fulfills the financial needs of elected officials. This in my mind creates an unethical environment subjecting all parties to a great deal of temptation.
Brill quotes Congressman Frank as stating:
“The more important an issue is to the public…the less important the lobbyist are…the one thing politicians care more about than money is votes…so when an issue catches the public interest, lobbyist and contributions will almost always take a back seat – unless the politician is a crook.”
I’d like to believe it is always as innocent and serene as Frank describes. Franks statement “…lobbyist and contributions will almost always take a back seat – unless the politician is a crook” is shaky ground. In an environment where the exchange of cash accompanies the exchange of “recommendations” are considered “legal” distinguishing between activities that are ethical versus unethical or whether one is a “crook” or not seems nearly impossible in my opinion.
In closing two key quotes mentioned above linger in my mind:
“I help my boss the most when I can play the good lobbyist off each other, just the way a judge or jury hears all the evidence and the lawyers’ arguments and then decides.”
And:
“But in court you don’t have the lawyers and clients donating to the jury.” says David Arkush, the director of Congress Watch
Roberts:That’s right; we can’t have an economy without jobs.
Keiser:Now why is it so difficult, because even the word “jobs” in America has become a dirty word. People seem to think that only poor people have jobs, as a matter of fact if you have tried to get a job in America today, if you are currently unemployed, they wont even talk to you, so there’s a total disconnect between what makes an economy in terms of fundamental piece, that is to say jobs, how did this happen?
Roberts: Because of the very clever propaganda that economists conduct for the global corporations.
If you say protectionist, it’s a way of turning off debate or shedding up somebody who has some facts and also they have learned that being concerned with some jobs might be dangerous to their profits because at some point Americans will catch that all their jobs are exported . The biggest export is our jobs, so people who keep saying “protectionist”, what are they willing to do? Have a jobless economy so they can say we have free trade in the United States? But you see there’s a huge confusion because offshoring is not a free trade.
David Ricardo, who developed the theory of free trade, made it very clear that absolute advantage is totally different from comparative advantage. Free trade is based on comparative advantage which requires a country’s capital to remain at home, find its best use, employ its own workers and make products its best trade to other countries that are doing the same thing.
Keiser:How do you fight for jobs? What is left in the arsenal to fight for jobs?
Roberts:Nothing, one of the reasons they like offshoring is to destroy the unions so that’s one of the reasons free market economists and corporations are so keen on offshoring, it destroys the unions.
Even if monetary policy works; let’s suppose the banks were heavily indebted and the consumers were not so heavily indebted; and the banks could actually lend and the consumers could actually borrow; it still doesn’t lead to American jobs, maybe to retail clerks, but what the Americans would be buying with their credit would be the goods made offshore, so it doesn’t transfer into American jobs.
If you look at the job reports, the only jobs that have been created in the 21st century in America are domestic service jobs like waiters, bartenders, hospital orderlies, construction workers, real estate, they are continuing to lose manufacture jobs, and not creating jobs for scientists and engineers and this has now been going on for a decade.
There’s so much loss, so many skills, so much infrastructure. When you move the main factory offshore, you destroy all the suppliers all the way down to the foundry levels. What the US is going through is a process of disdevelopment of becoming an undeveloped economy; it’s the opposite of economic development going on in the US. I predicted it through the beginning of this century that if this continued in 20 years the US would be a third world country and we are now taking on attributes of a third world country, such as large scale unemployment.
I’ve used Paul Craig Roberts articles many times on this site because he gets it.
Yet none of the major’s like the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Etc. will publish his articles anymore.
And your favorite economists, if you listen to any of them tell you exactly what he mentions above and they call you a protectionist if you try and explain what is happening to our country.
Well, I’ve never considered myself a protectionist, but if that is what it takes, By God, I am now a red blooded, born again American Protectionist and I’m here to tell you that these economists and the mainstream media that I call the Tokyo Rose Propaganda Group do not work for you or your best interests.
They work for the corporations that allow them to keep their jobs so that they can keep the lifestyle that they have come to enjoy.
I’ve been wondering for some time now when this would happen.
Yet the executives of some of our very large corporations continue to slap each other on the back not realizing that a million jobs here and a million jobs there adds up really fast.
Do you reckon they will ever look themselves in the mirror in the morning with some remorse, or are they totally clueless that it is their efforts that are destroying everything that their and our ancestors worked for and fought for so that we could have a better life?
A chiropractic office in Lapeer County’s Deerfield Township allows creativity when it comes to payment. “This establishment accepts any form of silver, gold, chicken, apple pie, if someone works it out with me,” said Jeff Kotchounian of Deerfield Chiropractic. “I’ve taken many things.”
Political Toadies, worthless promises, and the reality of Smoke & Mirrors
By Mitch Gurney
July 16, 2010
Our political process is extremely polarized and becomes even more so during campaign seasons. And there is little substance to all the rhetoric and promises these politicians make to placate a clueless electorate. Now, while in the mist of another election season we hear as usual all the same campaign rhetoric and ranting from politicians promising to fight for jobs, lower taxes, reduce the deficit, etc with each party faulting the other for all that ails us. It seems to me if elected officials actually delivered on their promises we’d be onto new goals and new promises. But obviously public campaign promises aren’t made with any intentions in fulfilling them. And it also seems to me both parties have shared responsibilities for the mess we’re in.
Recent polls indicate that perhaps people are waking up and realizing neither party offers any real solutions and are the primary creators of our problems. But are we really waking up and will we seek the right sort of change that would perhaps result in different outcomes?
Two recent polls show voters are losing confidence with Obama and Democrats in Congress:
According to one poll, only 43% of Americans have a great deal or a good amount of confidence in Obama to make the right decisions for the country’s future. This compares to 57% that said they have just some confidence or none at all.
In what could be a promising sign indicating we are waking up, according to the same poll:
An overwhelming 62% of Americans said they are inclined to find someone new to vote for in the November elections rather than to re-elect their current representative, strongly reflecting the anti-incumbent sentiment among many Americans.
That could be interpreted as a good thing but once again the “someone new to vote for” will most likely be either a Democrat or a Republican. And this leads to the reason for posing the question whether folks are really waking up and if we will seek the right sort of change. According to the same poll:
“Americans generally continue to favor Democrats handling the economy over Republicans, with the poll showing that 42% trust Democrats over Republicans while 34% trust Republicans over Democrats.”
Why? What possible reasons are there for us to believe or trust either party? According to the findings, while not stating as much, there appears to be about 24% of those polled that appear not to trust either party which means we have a long way to go. While pondering this bear in mind there have only been two parties and their corporate cronies running the show in Washington, each party in servitude to the same corporate networks whose campaign and lobbyist funds they desperately need to stay in office.
It is understood by many that politicians often lie so regardless of the party they represent why do we ever believe or trust them? There may be many reasons why they lie but one very effective reason is to keep Americans divided and conquered. Another may be to deflect attention from their actual agenda which is to serve their corporate sponsors.
Modern Washington is far removed from the Gilded Age, when, it’s been said, the lackeys of robber barons literally deposited sacks of cash on the desks of friendly legislators. Today’s cash comes in the form of ever increasing campaign donations from corporate executives and Wall Street, their ever larger platoons of lobbyists and their hordes of PR flacks.
You can track your favorite politician and learn about their corporate sponsors by visiting OpenSecrets.org which reports:
Federal campaign contributions from lobbyists are slightly down this election cycle compared to the same time period before the last midterm election. But Democrats are pulling in more lobbyist cash — just as Republicans did when they held the majority in both houses of Congress.
Twenty-eight members of Congress and congressional candidates have received at least $100,000 from lobbyists during the first five quarters of the 2010 election cycle, a Center for Responsive Politics analysis shows.
There’s numerous campaign promises bantered about by politicians that drive me nuts. But one in particular that I find an insult to my intelligence is how they will fight for jobs. Anytime I hear that I wonder where the hell they have been for the past 30 years and what planet they’re from. Oh, they’re fighting for jobs alright, only not for American jobs.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce accuses Obama and his Democrats in Congress of neglecting job creation and hampering growth with burdensome regulatory and tax policies. Interestingly the Chamber represents big U.S businesses and aren’t these the same firms that have been outsourcing our jobs for the last 30 years? Certainly they know the truth for why U.S jobs are in a funk. This is all smoke and mirrors designed to further daze and confuse an already dizzy populace.
Just this week the Chamber along with a few of their biggest corporate cronies held a “Jobs for America Summit” with Obama at the White House pressing him to do more to create jobs. The Chamber said the administration:
[Has]…neglected America’s number one priority – creating the more than 20 million jobs we need over the next 10 years for those who lost their jobs, have left the job market, or were cut to part-time status — as well as new entrants into our workforce…
Ironic isn’t it? As major sources of jobs what responsibility do these gilded Chamber members have in contributing to the 20 million jobs increase over the next 10 years? If history is any guide over the last 30 years these same companies have outsourced millions of our jobs. I have a suggestion, why don’t these big companies begin by bringing back the jobs they outsourced?
May 4 (Bloomberg) — President Barack Obama proposed raising about $190 billion over the next decade by outlawing three offshore tax-avoidance techniques used by U.S. companies such as Caterpillar Inc. and Procter & Gamble Co…. the biggest chunk, the administration is targeting a strategy that allows U.S.-based multinational companies to effectively hide from the Internal Revenue Service the role their foreign subsidiaries play in shifting profits into low-tax jurisdictions such as the Cayman Islands.
HOUSTON — As you work on your taxes this month, here’s something to raise your hackles: Some of the world’s biggest, most profitable corporations enjoy a far lower tax rate than you do–that is, if they pay taxes at all.
The most egregious example is General Electric. Last year the conglomerate generated $10.3 billion in pretax income, but ended up owing nothing to Uncle Sam. In fact, it recorded a tax benefit of $1.1 billion.
The Reuters report regarding the Jobs Summit points out that:
The tensions with the business community could prove troublesome for Obama on more than just the political front. U.S. businesses are holding onto a record $1.8 trillion in cash that they are opting not to invest. The administration wants to encourage them to use that money in hopes that greater investment will help jump-start the economic recovery.
The article indicates the business community feels a disconnection with the Administration and a bit unloved:
Ivan Seidenberg, chairman of the Business Roundtable, said last month there was a “disconnect” between Washington and the business community. In a speech, Seidenberg, chief executive of Verizon Communications, also urged the administration to rethink its priorities.
In an interview with Reuters, the chief executive of Loews Corp said the Obama administration is making businesses feel “unloved” and reluctant to put money to work.
Although it’s not stated where on the plant they would invest, the references that U.S companies are “holding a record $1.8 trillion in cash” and opting not “putting it to work” may lead some to assume these American companies would invest some of these funds in the U.S in order to aid our sick economy plus put people back to work.
But assumptions are generally useless and it’s really pretty simple math. Companies make investments based on the best return on investments (ROI). At this point in time it is much cheaper to operate abroad, in India for example, with lower start up cost and lower cost of labor and operations yielding a better ROI. In 2006 Cisco announced investing $1.1 billion to set up a center in India:
NEW DELHI — Network equipment maker Cisco Systems Inc will set up a center in India to support all aspects of its worldwide operations, the company’s chief executive said Wednesday.
CEO John Chambers also said Cisco’s $1.1 billion India investment plan, announced in October last year, is on course and the company plans to launch a pilot manufacturing project in the South Asian country by March next year.
Commenting on the U.S Chambers White House Jobs Summit Mr Reich points out:
The irony is that many of America’s surging imports are coming from these same American-based companies. They’re either employing foreign workers to make things for sale in the U.S., contracting with foreign companies to do so, or contracting for parts and supplies. Jobs for America Summit? These executives don’t care about American jobs. They care about their own bottom lines. That’s what they’re paid to care about… their bottom lines have little or nothing to do with good jobs for Americans. They have to do with good returns for American investors.
I hate to burst any illusions but there will be no meaningful jobs growth in the U.S until the manufacturing lost through outsourcing over the last 30 years return to U.S and this won’t happen until the cost of labor, cost of operations, and ROI for companies in this country reaches parity with those of the third world. Seriously, how is a U.S based programmer earning $40k or more per year going to compete with $8k per year Chinese programmers with engineering degrees? There is only on direction for U.S. salaries and our standard of living to go, and that is down.
We have reached a point of critical mass in terms of the volume of jobs lost due to outsourcing and the effect this is having on our economy. I recently read an article highlighting the opinions made by former Intel Chairman and CEO Andy Grove published by Bloomberg. Rocky Vega writing for the Daily Reckoning observed in “Time is running out for making U.S. jobs” regarding Mr Grove’s opinion piece:
“Andy Grove, one of Intel’s earliest employees and its former Chairman and CEO, offers his take on how the US must create jobs at home instead of in China. As he sees it, the cost of rising wages and benefits in the US has eroded the nation’s ability to compete versus China’s low-cost labor machine.”
US companies have understandably chosen to ship work overseas in order to boost profits and please shareholders in the short term. However, the number of offshored positions has become staggering. These decisions have contributed to the frailty of the US manufacturing sector, and Grove probes what could be done differently.
From his opinion piece in Bloomberg Mr Grove states:
“Today, manufacturing employment in the U.S. computer industry is about 166,000 — lower than it was before the first personal computer, the MITS Altair 2800, was assembled in 1975. Meanwhile, a very effective computer-manufacturing industry has emerged in Asia, employing about 1.5 million workers — factory employees, engineers and managers.
“The largest of these companies is Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., also known as Foxconn. The company has grown at an astounding rate, first in Taiwan and later in China. Its revenue last year was $62 billion, larger than Apple Inc., Microsoft Corp., Dell Inc. or Intel. Foxconn employs more than 800,000 people, more than the combined worldwide head count of Apple, Dell, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard Co., Intel and Sony Corp…You could say, as many do, that shipping jobs overseas is no big deal because the high-value work — and much of the profits — remain in the U.S. That may well be so. But what kind of a society are we going to have if it consists of highly paid people doing high-value-added work — and masses of unemployed? Since the early days of Silicon Valley, the money invested in companies has increased dramatically, only to produce fewer jobs. Simply put, the U.S. has become wildly inefficient at creating American tech jobs.”
Foxconn is a multinational business group anchored by the Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., Ltd. and is primarily a contracting firm manufacturing products like the Mac mini, the iPod, the iPad, and the iPhone for Apple Inc., Intel-branded motherboards for Intel Corp., various orders for American computer manufacturers, Dell and Hewlett-Packard; the PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3 for Sony; the Wii for Nintendo; the Xbox 360 for Microsoft; cellular phones for Motorola and Nokia; the Amazon Kindle; and Cisco equipment.
Mr Vega continues:
Foxconn’s employment of 800,000 — more than Apple, Dell, MSFT, HP, Intel, and Sony combined — is simply astounding. It’s a stunning example of how quickly offshoring has transferred employment from the US to China. And, it’s not a mechanism that works so easily in reverse.
Mr Grove most certainly is in the know in that Intel over the years has outsourced thousands of U.S. jobs. In commenting on Andy Grove’s opinion Robert Reich points out:
Recently, Andy Grove, chairman of Intel, wrote that America should levy an extra tax on the product of offshored labor and give the money to American companies that will use it to grow their U.S. operations and create more jobs in the United States. The only small problem with this idea is it violates international trade law and would almost certainly lead to retaliatory tariffs against American exports. Grove doesn’t seem too bothered. “If the result is a trade war,” he writes, “treat it like other wars—fight to win.”
What Grove doesn’t say is that over 70 percent of Intel’s revenues now come from its sales abroad. A trade war is the last thing Intel…needs.
When Cisco announced their investment in India in 2006 it was reported that:
Cisco does not directly manufacture its products. Instead, it hires companies like Foxconn and Celestica of Canada to set up dedicated manufacturing facilities.
What politician is leveling with us about these facts or promises to reverse this trend? And even if they do they may as well be passing gas because in reality they have no financial incentive or will to do anything about it. That’s not the job their corporate cronies are paying them to do.
In addition to the generous profits corporations realize from outsourcing there are tax incentives our beloved job fighting custodians in Washington have put in place that further benefit these companies. Mike “Mish” Shedlock, Mish’s Global Economic Analysis notes:
US Tax policy is another reason for outsourcing, and that can easily be addressed, at least in theory. US corporate tax policy allows deferment of profits overseas, but profits in the US have a tax rate of 35%. This policy literally begs corporations to move profits and jobs, overseas.
For additional insights on U.S companies abandoning U.S workers see:
President Obama revealed he understands the situation by stating during his campaign:
“This time we want to talk about the fact that the real problem is not that someone who doesn’t look like you might take your job; it’s that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit”.
Senator Obama speech “A More Perfect Union” March 18, 2008, Philadelphia, Pa.
Obama explained his position for ending the corporate tax breaks to shelter profits offshore by stating:
“I want to see our companies remain the most competitive in the world,” Obama said. “But the way to make sure that happens is not to reward our companies for moving jobs off our shores or transferring profits to overseas tax havens.”
“The White House will call this a victory,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). “But as credit tightens, regulations multiply and job creation slows even further as a result of this bill, they’ll have a hard time convincing the American people that this is a victory for them.”
I believe historical context is important if we want to really understand an issue and strive to write articles with that perspective in mind. And here with this issue historical context becomes useful. It seems reasonable to assume that an elected American official such as Senator McConnell will perform their custodial role by keeping their constituents best interest at heart. But assumptions most often prove inaccurate and useless.
Senator McConnell has served in the Senate since 1985. What does his record reflect in relation to jobs for his constituents of Kentucky? In February 2008 I wrote Revisiting NAFTA in which I highlight the Senators activities based on a CNN report the Fruit of its Labor:
Published November 1, 1999 by CNN.com, Fruit of its Labor chronicles the activities of Fruit of the Loom who at the time was “suffering from bad performance and poor management and lobbying heavily for a bill that would ripen its bottom line.” Fruit needed to make a “$45 million interest payment on an accumulated debt of $1.3 billion” and its stock had fallen from $48 per share a few years before to $4”.
The story goes that Fruit “handed out more than $435,000 in soft-money donations, a figure that puts contributions by the firm ahead of those of such giants as Coca-Cola, Exxon and Bank of America. Most of Fruit’s plums go to Republicans, including $265,000 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee, run by Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, the principal opponent of campaign finance reform”.
Congress had successfully “killed campaign finance reform” and “could now get on” with more pressing business, “such as an amendment to an African trade bill that would allow apparel produced in the Caribbean Basin to enter the U.S. duty free, provided it is assembled from U.S. fabric”.
“Fruit’s lobbyists – along with those from competitors like the Sara Lee Corp., [makers of Hanes underwear] and retailers like the Limited and the Gap – [were] pushing hard for passage. Fruit officials claim the measure, which President Clinton supported, will create jobs, and deny that the company’s donations can buy influence. Says Ron Sorini, a Fruit lobbyist: “There’s absolutely no correlation between our soft-money donations and those who decide to vote in favor of this bill.”
The Bill, H.R.434, aka “Trade and Development Act of 2000,” falling within the umbrella of NAFTA was a revision and an extension to existing legislation known as the “Caribbean Basin Economic Recovery Act” launched in 1983. On May 4, 2000 the House of Representatives approved the bill by a vote of 309 to 110. The Senate approved the bill by a vote of 77 to 19 on May 11, 2000. It was signed into law on May 18, 2000 by President Clinton becoming P.L [Public Law] 106- 200. More on Bill
“Fruit confirms …the bill is expected to deliver a quick $25 million to $50 million to the bottom line, adding to savings achieved after moving some 17,000 of its U.S. based jobs, mostly to the low-wage Caribbean Basin, and reincorporating in the tax haven Cayman Islands. The job cuts were spread across the South, especially Kentucky, [Senator McConnell’s state] where earlier in this decade Fruit was one of the largest employers”.
Senator Mitch McConnell voted in favor of the bill, HR 434 - the “Trade and Development Act of 2000.” So we now see the kind of victory he delivered for his fellow Kentuckians. Perhaps we assume to much and should be much clearer as to which constituents our elected officials actually intend to represent.
So while we may want our politicians to be more forthright the reality is there is no financial incentive for them to do so at least where the public welfare is concerned. If any of them actually challenged the firmly established corporate political infrastructure how much heat and pressure do you suppose they would encounter and just how long do you suppose their political careers would last?
Thursday the President pronounced that “because of this [financial reform] bill the American people will never again be asked to foot the bill for Wall Street’s mistakes.”
As if to prove him wrong, Goldman Sachs simultaneously announced it had struck a deal with federal prosecutors to pay $550 million to settle federal claims it misled investor — a sum representing a mere 15 days profit for the firm based on its 2009 earnings. Goldman’s share price immediately jumped 4.3 percent, and the Street proclaimed its chair and CEO, Lloyd (“Goldman is doing God’s work”) Blankfein, a winner. Financial analysts rushed to affirm a glowing outlook for Goldman stock.
Blankfein, you may recall, was at the meeting in late 2008 when Tim Geithner and Hank Paulson decided to bail out AIG, and thereby deliver through AIG a $13 billion no-strings-attached taxpayer windfall to Goldman. In a world where money is the measure of everything, Blankfein’s power and influence have grown. Presumably, Goldman can expect more windfalls in future years.
Although the financial reform bill may have clipped some of Goldman’s wings — its lucrative derivative business may require Goldman to jettison its status as a bank holding company, and the access to the Fed discount window that comes with it — the main point is that the Goldman settlement reveals everything that’s weakest about the financial reform bill.
The American people will continue to have to foot the bill for the mistakes of Wall Street’s biggest banks because the legislation does nothing to diminish the economic and political power of these giants. It does not cap their size. It does not resurrect the Glass-Steagall Act that once separated commercial (normal) banking from investment (casino) banking. It does not even link the pay of their traders and top executives to long-term performance. In other words, it does nothing to change their basic structure. And for this reason, it gives them an implicit federal insurance policy against failure unavailable to smaller banks — thereby adding to their economic and political power in the future.
The bill contains hortatory language but is precariously weak in the details. The so-called Volcker Rule has been watered down and delayed. Blanche Lincoln’s important proposal that derivatives be traded in separate entities which aren’t subsidized by commercial deposits has been shrunk and compromised. Customized derivates can remain underground. The consumer protection agency has been lodged in the Fed, whose own consumer division failed miserably to protect consumers last time around.
On every important issue the legislation merely passes on to regulators decisions about how to oversee the big banks and treat them if they’re behaving badly. But if history proves one lesson it’s that regulators won’t and can’t. They don’t have the resources. They don’t have the knowledge. They are staffed by people in their 30s and 40s who are paid a small fraction of what the lawyers working for the banks are paid. Many want and expect better-paying jobs on Wall Street after they leave government, and so are shrink-wrapped in a basic conflict of interest. And the big banks’ lawyers and accountants can run circles around them by threatening protracted litigation.
Why do you think Goldman got off so easily from such serious charges of fraud?
Reliance on the discretion of regulators rather than structural changes in the banking system plays directly into the hands of the big banks and their executives and traders who contribute mightily to Democratic and Republican campaigns. The flow of money virtually guarantees that regulatory agencies won’t be adequately staffed to enforce the law, that penalties for violations won’t be overly onerous, and that all loopholes (what’s a “derivative”? what has to be listed on exchanges? exactly how much capital must be on hand for which transactions? How are the various forms of predatory lending to be defined?) will be easily stretched in future years. Wall Street lawyers will have a field day. The profit-for-nothing sector of the economy (law, accounting, finance) will continue to grow buoyantly.
Make no mistake: As long as there’s no fundamental change in the structure of Wall Street — as long as the big banks stay as big and are allowed to grow bigger, and have every incentive to invent new financial gimmicks with which to bet other peoples’ money — they will remain too big to fail, and too politically powerful to control.
Goldman’s share price, as well as those of JP Morgan Chase, Citicorps, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America, will no doubt soar the basis of the final bill because their future profits are almost guaranteed. The pay of their executives and traders, and of the managers of hedge funds and private-equity funds they deal with, will likewise accelerate. In the short term the economy will benefit, at least to the extent financial entrepreneurship is now the apex of American wealth and innovation. But over the longer term we will be much weaker for it.
Congress has labored mightily to produce a mountain of legislation that can be called financial reform, but it has produced a molehill relative to the wreckage Wall Street wreaked upon the nation.
Missing from almost all discussion of America’s dizzying rate of unemployment is the brute fact that hourly wages of people with jobs have been dropping, adjusted for inflation. Average weekly earnings rose a bit this spring only because the typical worker put in more hours, but June’s decline in average hours pushed weekly paychecks down at an annualized rate of 4.5 percent.
In other words, Americans are keeping their jobs or finding new ones only by accepting lower wages.
Meanwhile, a much smaller group of Americans’ earnings are back in the stratosphere: Wall Street traders and executives, hedge-fund and private-equity fund managers, and top corporate executives. As hiring has picked up on the Street, fat salaries are reappearing. Richard Stein, president of Global Sage, an executive search firm, tells the New York Times corporate clients have offered compensation packages of more than $1 million annually to a dozen candidates in just the last few weeks.
We’re back to the same ominous trend as before the Great Recession: a larger and larger share of total income going to the very top while the vast middle class continues to lose ground.
And as long as this trend continues, we can’t get out of the shadow of the Great Recession. When most of the gains from economic growth go to a small sliver of Americans at the top, the rest don’t have enough purchasing power to buy what the economy is capable of producing.
America’s median wage, adjusted for inflation, has barely budged for decades. Between 2000 and 2007 it actually dropped. Under these circumstances the only way the middle class could boost its purchasing power was to borrow, as it did with gusto. As housing prices rose, Americans turned their homes into ATMs. But such borrowing has its limits. When the debt bubble finally burst, vast numbers of people couldn’t pay their bills, and banks couldn’t collect.
Each of America’s two biggest economic downturns over the last century has followed the same pattern. Consider: in 1928 the richest 1 percent of Americans received 23.9 percent of the nation’s total income. After that, the share going to the richest 1 percent steadily declined. New Deal reforms, followed by World War II, the GI Bill and the Great Society expanded the circle of prosperity. By the late 1970s the top 1 percent raked in only 8 to 9 percent of America’s total annual income. But after that, inequality began to widen again, and income reconcentrated at the top. By 2007 the richest 1 percent were back to where they were in 1928—with 23.5 percent of the total.
We all know what happened in the years immediately following these twin peaks—in 1929 and 2008.
Yes, China, Germany and Japan have contributed to America’s demand-side problem by failing to buy as much from us as we buy from them. But to believe that our continuing economic crisis stems mainly from the trade imbalance—we buy too much and save too little, while they do the reverse—is to miss the biggest imbalance of all. The problem isn’t that typical Americans have spent beyond their means. It’s that their means haven’t kept up with what the growing economy could and should have been able to provide them.
A second parallel links 1929 with 2008: when earnings accumulate at the top, people at the top invest their wealth in whatever assets seem most likely to attract other big investors. This causes the prices of certain assets—commodities, stocks, dot-coms or real estate—to become wildly inflated. Such speculative bubbles eventually burst, leaving behind mountains of near-worthless collateral.
The crash of 2008 didn’t turn into another Great Depression because the government learned the importance of flooding the market with cash, thereby temporarily rescuing some stranded consumers and most big bankers. But the financial rescue didn’t change the economy’s underlying structure — median wages dropping while those at the top are raking in the lion’s share of income.
That’s why America’s middle class still doesn’t have the purchasing power it needs to reboot the economy, and why the so-called recovery will be so tepid—maybe even leading to a double dip. It’s also why America will be vulnerable to even larger speculative booms and deeper busts in the years to come.
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The structural problem began in the late 1970s when a wave of new technologies (air cargo, container ships and terminals, satellite communications and, later, the Internet) radically reduced the costs of outsourcing jobs abroad. Other new technologies (automated machinery, computers and ever more sophisticated software applications) took over many other jobs (remember bank tellers? telephone operators? service station attendants?). By the ’80s, any job requiring that the same steps be performed repeatedly was disappearing—going over there or into software. Meanwhile, as the pay of most workers flattened or dropped, the pay of well-connected graduates of prestigious colleges and MBA programs—the so-called “talent” who reached the pinnacles of power in executive suites and on Wall Street—soared.
The puzzle is why so little was done to counteract these forces. Government could have given employees more bargaining power to get higher wages, especially in industries sheltered from global competition and requiring personal service: big-box retail stores, restaurants and hotel chains, and child- and eldercare, for instance. Safety nets could have been enlarged to compensate for increasing anxieties about job loss: unemployment insurance covering part-time work, wage insurance if pay drops, transition assistance to move to new jobs in new locations, insurance for communities that lose a major employer so they can lure other employers. With the gains from economic growth the nation could have provided Medicare for all, better schools, early childhood education, more affordable public universities, more extensive public transportation. And if more money was needed, taxes could have been raised on the rich.
Big, profitable companies could have been barred from laying off a large number of workers all at once, and could have been required to pay severance—say, a year of wages—to anyone they let go. Corporations whose research was subsidized by taxpayers could have been required to create jobs in the United States. The minimum wage could have been linked to inflation. And America’s trading partners could have been pushed to establish minimum wages pegged to half their countries’ median wages—thereby ensuring that all citizens shared in gains from trade and creating a new global middle class that would buy more of our exports.
But starting in the late 1970s, and with increasing fervor over the next three decades, government did just the opposite. It deregulated and privatized. It increased the cost of public higher education and cut public transportation. It shredded safety nets. It halved the top income tax rate from the range of 70–90 percent that prevailed during the 1950s and ’60s to 28–40 percent; it allowed many of the nation’s rich to treat their income as capital gains subject to no more than 15 percent tax and escape inheritance taxes altogether. At the same time, America boosted sales and payroll taxes, both of which have taken a bigger chunk out of the pay of the middle class and the poor than of the well-off.
Companies were allowed to slash jobs and wages, cut benefits and shift risks to employees (from you-can-count-on-it pensions to do-it-yourself 401(k)s, from good health coverage to soaring premiums and deductibles). They busted unions and threatened employees who tried to organize. The biggest companies went global with no more loyalty or connection to the United States than a GPS device. Washington deregulated Wall Street while insuring it against major losses, turning finance—which until recently had been the servant of American industry—into its master, demanding short-term profits over long-term growth and raking in an ever larger portion of the nation’s profits. And nothing was done to impede CEO salaries from skyrocketing to more than 300 times that of the typical worker (from thirty times during the Great Prosperity of the 1950s and ’60s), while the pay of financial executives and traders rose into the stratosphere.
It’s too facile to blame Ronald Reagan and his Republican ilk. Democrats have been almost as reluctant to attack inequality or even to recognize it as the central economic and social problem of our age. (As Bill Clinton’s labor secretary, I should know.) The reason is simple. As money has risen to the top, so has political power. Politicians are more dependent than ever on big money for their campaigns. Modern Washington is far removed from the Gilded Age, when, it’s been said, the lackeys of robber barons literally deposited sacks of cash on the desks of friendly legislators. Today’s cash comes in the form of ever increasing campaign donations from corporate executives and Wall Street, their ever larger platoons of lobbyists and their hordes of PR flacks.
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The Great Recession could have spawned another era of fundamental reform, just as the Great Depression did. But the financial rescue reduced immediate demands for broader reform.
Obama might still have succeeded had he framed the challenge accurately. Yet in reassuring the public that the economy will return to normal he has missed a key opportunity to expose the longer-term scourge of widening inequality and its dangers. Containing the immediate financial crisis and then claiming the economy is on the mend has left the public with a diffuse set of economic problems that seem unrelated and inexplicable, as if a town’s fire chief deals with a conflagration by protecting the biggest office buildings but leaving smaller fires simmering all over town: housing foreclosures, job losses, lower earnings, less economic security, soaring pay on Wall Street and in executive suites.
Much the same has occurred with efforts to reform the financial system. The White House and Democratic leaders could have described the overarching goal as overhauling economic institutions that bestow outsize rewards on a relative few while imposing extraordinary costs and risks on almost everyone else. Instead, they have defined the goal narrowly: reducing risks to the financial system caused by particular practices on Wall Street. The solution has thereby shriveled to a set of technical fixes for how the Street should conduct its business.
What we get from widening inequality is not only a more fragile economy but also an angrier politics. When virtually all the gains from growth go to a small minority at the top — and the broad middle class can no longer pretend it’s richer than it is by using homes as collateral for deepening indebtedness — the result is deep-seated anxiety and frustration. This is an open invitation to demagogues who misconnect the dots and direct the anger toward immigrants, the poor, foreign nations, big government, “socialists,” “intellectual elites,” or even big business and Wall Street. The major fault line in American politics is no longer between Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, but between the “establishment” and an increasingly mad-as-hell populace determined to “take back America” from it.
When they understand where this is heading, powerful interests that have so far resisted fundamental reform may come to see that the alternative is far worse.
President Obama has vowed to double U.S. exports within the next five years. That’s because exports are critical for rebooting the American economy. It’s clear American consumers can’t get the economy going on their own. They can’t restart the jobs machine. They’ve run out of money and credit.
It’s not just that one out of four Americans is unemployed or underemployed (working part-time, overqualified, or at a lower wage than before). More significantly, the Great Recession burst the housing bubble that had let American consumers turn their homes into ATMs. Now the cash machines are closed.
So the Administration figures foreign consumers will have to fill the gap.
Problem is, most other economies also relied on American consumers. Remember the trade gap? Americans used to be the world’s biggest and most reliable customers – sucking in high-tech gadgets assembled in China, car parts from Japan, shirts and shoes from Southeast Asia, and precision instruments from Germany.
With American consumers pulling back, these other economies have also been slowing down. Their unemployment is rising.
Last week I attended a conference with global business executives. When I asked them where they expected to find new customers to replace Americans who are pulling back, they all said China and India and quoted me the same number: 800 million new middle-class consumers from these and other fast-developing countries over the next decade.
Yes, but. As of now China and India are still relying on net exports to fuel their growth. Even if you think their middle classes will eventually become so big and rich they can buy everything these nations will be able to produce, that doesn’t mean they’ll also buy what the rest of the world produces.
Yes, global companies will do wonderfully well. General Motors is well on the way to selling more cars in China than it does in the U.S. But American workers won’t get the jobs, and nor will workers in Europe, Japan, or the rest of the world. GM makes the cars it sells to Chinese consumers in China.
Meanwhile, the productive capacities of China and India will continue to grow: More workers, more factories, more high-tech equipment, more offices. The buying power of their middle classes will have to expand rapidly just to catch up with what these nations will be able to produce.
This means Obama and others won’t easily find the export markets they need to create enough jobs to make up for the vanishing American consumer.
When the world’s productive capacities exceed the buying power of the world’s consumers, every government wants to increase exports and discourage imports. That spells trade war.
Last week the representatives of the world’s 20 biggest economies vowed to slash their budget deficits by half by 2013. The result will be even less domestic demand and even more pressure to export in order to avoid higher joblessness.
We’re unlikely to see a repeat of the disastrous Smoot-Hawley tariffs that worsened and lengthened the Great Depression. But you can forget trade-opening agreements. In Toronto last week, the G-20 leaders dropped their 2009 pledge to finish the Doha round this year. In the U.S., agreements with South Korea, Panama, and Colombia are languishing.
And watch out for under-the-radar protectionist moves. Since the start of 2008, when the Great Recession began, countries around the world have already imposed at least 443 measures to block imports, according to the Center for Economic Policy Research.
A bill to designate the facility of the United States Postal Service located at 100 Broadway in Lynbrook, New York, as the "Navy Corpsman Jeffrey L. Wiener Post Office Building". (07/30/2010 legislative day) […]
To designate the facility of the United States Postal Service located at 405 West Second Street in Dixon, Illinois, as the "President Ronald W. Reagan Post Office Building". (07/30/2010 legislative day) […]
To designate the facility of the United States Postal Service located at 151 North Maitland Avenue in Maitland, Florida, as the "Paula Hawkins Post Office Building". (07/30/2010 legislative day) […]
To amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to repeal the expansion of certain information reporting requirements to corporations and to payments for property, to eliminate loopholes which encourage companies to move operations offshore, and for other purposes. (07/30/2010 legislative day) […]
To provide for the conveyance of a small parcel of National Forest System land in the Francis Marion National Forest in South Carolina, and for other purposes. (07/30/2010 legislative day) […]
Recognizing the 50th anniversary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the pioneering of college students whose determination and nonviolent resistance led to the desegregation of lunch counters and places of public accommodation over a 5-year period. (07/30/2010 legislative day) […]
Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that fruit and vegetable and commodity producers are encouraged to display the American flag on labels of products grown in the United States, reminding us all to take pride in the healthy bounty produced by American farmers and workers. (07/30/2010 legislative day) […]
Providing for consideration of the bill (H.R. 3534) to provide greater efficiencies, transparency, returns, and accountability in the administration of Federal mineral and energy resources by consolidating administration of various Federal energy minerals management and leasing programs into one entity to be known as the Office of Federal Energy and Minerals […]
To increase the flexibility of the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development with respect to the amount of premiums charged for FHA single family housing mortgage insurance, and for other purposes. (07/30/2010 legislative day) […]
Attack the media as having “liberal bias”.